Tuesday, 5 November 2013

Review: Fiestar Go Electro On Their Daring New Single 'I Don't Know' [VIDEO]

In pop music, it is easy to overlook musical shortcomings if an artist is going for something new.

Pop divas like Lady Gaga, or Madonna before her, aren't revered for their ability to craft classic songs as much as they are watched with bated breath for the constant reinventions of their image and sound.

"I Don't Know," the new single by six-member girl group Fiestar, off of their new EP "Curious," has a sense of sonic adventure that is a refreshingly different sound from the rest of the current K-pop landscape.

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And the highlight of the song is clearly the verse.

Utilizing the melody from a popular Korean children's song, the backing track pulses and swirls around the vocals, recalling, in its best moments, shades of the abstract rhythmic construction of groundbreaking electronic genius Aphex Twin.

Then, just when the song appears ready to jump into dance club territory, "I Don't Know" jumps into marching band territory.

And while what follows is all downhill from there, with a hook that sounds way more grounded in the typical K-pop sound, taken as a whole "I Don't Know" is an intriguing attempt at breaking new ground on the dance floor.

It is actually interesting how different the hook is from the rest of the song, which gets downright arty at moments. You almost get the feeling that the song's producer, worrying that "I Don't Know" was getting too far from safe pop territory slapped on a standard issue K-pop hook.

The hook of "I Don't Know" sounds to this review like a sped up dance version of the chorus of Secret's "Yoo Hoo," but there are at least a half a dozen others that bear some similarity.

Fortunately there are enough boundary-breaking moments in "I Don't Know" to keep it interesting.

Perhaps next time, Fiestar and their producers will have the guts to go all the way with their sonic adventurism, without feeling the need to hide behind the safety of a time-tested hook.

But it doesn't seem very likely.

Check out "I Don't Know" the new single by Fiestar RIGHT HERE[embedded content]